Boosting Anti-Tuberculosis Immunity

A clinical trial in the November issue of Nature Medicine shows that a new vaccine against tuberculosis can induce a long-lasting boost of immune responses in people who previously received the widely used vaccine bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG).

In a trial of a candidate vaccine against tuberculosis, Helen McShane and her colleagues found that a modified vaccinia virus expressing antigen 85A of Mycobacterium tuberculosis induced immune responses in volunteers that had never been vaccinated. And people who received BCG 0.5-38 years before the new vaccine had substantially stronger responses than subjects that solely received BCG.

Boosting vaccinations with the modified vaccinia virus could offer a practical and efficient strategy for enhancing antituberculosis immunity in areas in which the disease is endemic.